Blog Archives for January 2013

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Alber Saber's appeal of his blasphemy conviction in Egypt is rejected. Saber was at the hearing, which muddies the previous reporting that he had left the country. This article, however, makes it unclear as to whether Saber attended this hearing, as he has been otherwise reported to be out of the country.

At CSICOP.org, Sharon Hill talks about the "sticky wicket" of the line-of-demarcation problem between science and what we call pseudoscience.

The modified policy would, in effect, kick the can down the road to local sponsors, who could continue the abominable policy of deeming gay teenagers too “immoral” to participate in Boy Scout activities.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Remember 2012? Man, that year was crazy. So crazy, we decided to take a comprehensive look at the work of CFI throughout the year, with an eye to 2013, and -- ta-da! -- we have our very first CFI Annual Report, just out today.

Really cool mini-documentary video: The US government didn't fake the Moon landing because they couldn't have, they didn't have the technology to do so. As in, they would have been unable to. Adds filmmaker S.G. Collins, "The US government lies all the time about all kinds of things, and if they haven't lied to you today, maybe they haven't had coffee yet."

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

The Secular Census releases a report on women's experiences in the freethought movement, based on their survey data. From the conclusion:

Women seem to want groups that do more than criticize religion. They are attracted to positive messages and education. They'd like their groups to share their values and take positions that reflect those values. They'd like their interactions to be positive; they seem quite willing to abandon groups where they have had to deal with problem behavior, including unwanted advances. They could sometimes use some help with childcare.

Of course, to really delve into this topic, you're going to want to register for the Women in Secularism 2 conference, happening in May in our nation's capital (presuming your nation is the United States). And now there are a whole ton of videos from last year's conference posted online.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

The president got himself sworn in once again yesterday (ceremonially, as he was sworn in officially the day before in private), and if you heard the speech and the surrounding to-do, you know that there was at least one really good thing for the reason-based community, and one not-so-good thing.

The not-so-good, man, was that inauguration God-heavy. Lots of biblical-this, scripture-that, God-given-this, we-pray-for-that. David Gibson has more on those themes. (And Cathy-Lynn Grossman reminds us that "so help me God" is an informal add-on to the oath.)

On the plus side, the president made a big stink in his speech about climate change, which surprise almost everybody. He rejected the nonsense about it being a hoax, and made clear that it was a generational responsibility to respond to the reality of the crisis. So that was cool.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Pakistan's ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, is accused of blasphemy for allegedly making comments that one angry guy felt were derogatory to the Prophet Mohammad. Rehman is a supporter of reform of Pakistan's blasphemy laws.

Because some folks asked what the CFI policy was on blocking folks on Twitter (though not in a nice way, like, at all), we decided to, you know, have a policy -- rare as it is. Here's the policy in full, and I blogged about it from my own perspective. Of course, all the comments are nasty, so I just can't win.

Deseret News focuses on the religious-liberty battles happening at the state level, and looks to our own Michael De Dora for perspective:

I try to tell our people, 'You might think that what's going on in Congress right now is the most important thing right now, but it's absolutely not. You need to pay attention to what's going on at the school board, city hall and state levels because that's where things are happening.

There's this really great post from one of our CFI On Campus folks, Seth Kurtenbach, on how IBM's Deep Blue may have passed the Turing Test as far back as 1997, at the expense of Garry Kasparov's sanity.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Yesterday, Ron Lindsay joined the panel on HuffPost Live to talk about the practice of borrowing religious rituals between and outside of their originating faiths. Of course it gets heated.

Who doesn't want to be more like Sherlock Holmes? (I mostly just want to be more like Benedict Cumberbatch.) On Point of Inquiry, guest Maria Konnikova tells us how to think more like the literary supersleuth.

CSI's Joe Nickell (nonreligious) talks about how he and his wife Diana (Baha'i) go together on "religabouts". . .

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Internet activist, co-creator of RSS, co-founder of Reddit Aaron Swartz kills himself in the midst of prosecutorial pressure after attempting to make freely available the contents of the JSTOR academic archive.

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald refuses to stop a new regulation in NYC concerning parental consent for metzitzah b'peh circumcisions, which are the ones "involving direct oral suction of the penis" by the rabbi.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

CFI chief Ron Lindsay is asking for it. As he gets set to meet with the leaders of the other big groups of the skepto-atheosphere, Ron wants to know what you think about how best to address some of the latest controversies and concerns of the movement. I tried to stop him, but he never listens to me. Anyway, read his post and help him out.

Meanwhile Faheem Younus at WaPo, a medical doctor and a Muslim, tells of his often-obstructed attempts to bridge religious divides in providing free flu vaccinations:

The ruthless flu virus was not going to screen Americans for their faith before attacking. I gave the flu shots to the worshippers at Bait-ur-Rehman mosque located in Silver Spring, MD. Free of charge. Free of expectation. Free of faith.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

HuffPo's Jaweed Kaleem explores the atheist take on death and lack of an afterlife, and talks to me and CFI-Indiana's Reba Boyd Wooden for some perspective. My quote's pretty fatalistic, but hey, that's me for ya.

We're pretty excited about this one, folks. Point of Inquiry's got Phil Plait, talking the end of the world.

The Verge: Kuwaiti activist Rashid Saleh al-Anzi sentenced to two years in prison for a tweet that "stabbed the rights and powers" of the country's emir.

The image to the right is from the Hindu American Foundation, which is pretty excited about the first Hindu congressperson, Tulsi Gabbard, here being sworn in by John Boehner on a Bhagavad Gita -- which I'm sure threw him for a loop.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Look out! Today's date is 1/3/13!!! That's, like, two thirteens right in a row if you ignore the slashes! And you don't add a zero before the single-digit numbers! And you don't write out "2013" in its entirety!

Speaking of which, the Washington Times, the paper founded by a guy who thought he was the messiah, reports on the fear of the number 13.

Michael De Dora reports on the UN's resolution calling for the end of female genital mutilation, "an irreparable, irreversible abuse of human rights of women and girls."